The Centre

The Centre drives high-quality child and youth mental health services by setting the bar for excellence and collaborating with others to pursue continuous quality improvement. We promote evidence-informed service planning and delivery and support practical research to close knowledge gaps when they get in the way of effective and accessible services.

Youth Wellness Hubs - Designing our future

Friday, September 15, 2017Tracey MacLaurin

The province of Ontario is committed to improving services for young people through integrated youth service hubs.

These hubs will be places where young people aged 12-25 can receive walk-in, one stop access to mental health and addictions services, as well as other social and employment supports under one roof.

To lay the groundwork for this process and to help create a vision for these hubs to identify their essential elements, we organized four engagement sessions; the initial one was hosted in Toronto in July, followed up with three more sessions in Northern Ontario (Kenora, Thunder Bay and Timmins).

At that time, we heard from 144 youth and families who provided input on:

the types of services that could be offered in a youth hub,

how youth and families should be involved in the design and creation of the hubs, and

how we can ensure the hubs contribute to youth and family friendly communities